was a game of summer and early fall, or the lavish, sunny retreats of Florida’s Sunshine Belt, where it was a winter pastime, were closed to him for a variety of reasons. They offered accommodations and their sumptuous facilities of fields, stables and quarters only to those who, first, bought and maintained the extravagant villas and condominiums that fell within their purview, and second, could meet the rigid, exclusive social and financial conditions that governed admission to the ruling country clubs.
Even those qualifying for membership in the clubs, should theyor their guests actually wish to play polo, were required to furnish and maintain at least one string of five or six ponies, together with the grooms to tend them. On those rare occasions when friendship or chance brought him into the recesses of one of these prodigal polo resorts, Fabian was not at all surprised to learn that the purchase and annual maintenance of a modest string of ponies and gear, and the expense of transporting them, could easily amount to a sum comparable to the salary of the head of a flourishing corporate enterprise.
Denied access to the central circuits of the game, unable to meet on common ground those who would be open to playing with him, Fabian was forced into his nomadic existence as much by necessity as by choice. The irony did not escape him that, of all the sports in which he might have excelled, polo was the one in which only a millionaire several times over could still afford to indulge, and at that, so few of them did.
The closing and decisive game of the Third International Eugene Stanhope Polo Tournament, played annually at Stanhope Estates, one of the country’s major polo and golf centers, near Chicago, for the Grail Industries Trophy and, not incidentally, a purse of a quarter-million dollars, was delayed by a downpour. In the stands and around the field, more than three thousand polo fans shuffled their umbrellas and raincoats, wondering noisily whether the South American Centauros and New Zealand’s Hybrids would be able to play on a marshy field. But the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Near Fabian, a silver-haired woman in a tweed suit folded an umbrella that she had been holding over a young man. Fabian saw that the young mans head, neck and torso were trapped by tightly fitted aluminum railing and knobs. His face—pale, pure features, oddly serene within that cage—seemed familiar; Fabian recognized him as an American polo player who a few months earlier had broken his neck in a game in the Midwest. At a sound coming over the loudspeakers, the young man twirled a knob at his hip; the contraption rotated him in the direction of a loge in the front row.
There Commodore Ernest Tenet Stanhope, once an eminentpolo player himself and now the family’s ninety-year-old patriarch, had risen to speak into the microphone. Wearing the customary white polo breeches and British helmet, he announced that, as honorary chairman of the tournament named in memory of his late son, Eugene, he had just been informed that his other and only surviving son, Patrick Stanhope, would regrettably not be able to attend; his obligations as president and executive director of Grail Industries, the Stanhope family enterprise and the nation’s largest electronics manufacturer, detained him. He had, however, generously made available the helicopters which would help to dry the field, so as to permit the tournament to take place. A roar went up from the stands, and then the patriarch passed the microphone to Lucretia Stanhope, his daughter-in-law, a stately widow of forty. Serene in her position as chief organizer, she apologized briefly for the delay.
Having taken occasion to remind the spectators that, only two years before her husband, Eugene Stanhope, had been killed tragically in a freak accident while preparing for this very tournament, she paused, then closed by announcing that the Eugene Stanhope Stables, breeders and
Even those qualifying for membership in the clubs, should theyor their guests actually wish to play polo, were required to furnish and maintain at least one string of five or six ponies, together with the grooms to tend them. On those rare occasions when friendship or chance brought him into the recesses of one of these prodigal polo resorts, Fabian was not at all surprised to learn that the purchase and annual maintenance of a modest string of ponies and gear, and the expense of transporting them, could easily amount to a sum comparable to the salary of the head of a flourishing corporate enterprise.
Denied access to the central circuits of the game, unable to meet on common ground those who would be open to playing with him, Fabian was forced into his nomadic existence as much by necessity as by choice. The irony did not escape him that, of all the sports in which he might have excelled, polo was the one in which only a millionaire several times over could still afford to indulge, and at that, so few of them did.
The closing and decisive game of the Third International Eugene Stanhope Polo Tournament, played annually at Stanhope Estates, one of the country’s major polo and golf centers, near Chicago, for the Grail Industries Trophy and, not incidentally, a purse of a quarter-million dollars, was delayed by a downpour. In the stands and around the field, more than three thousand polo fans shuffled their umbrellas and raincoats, wondering noisily whether the South American Centauros and New Zealand’s Hybrids would be able to play on a marshy field. But the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Near Fabian, a silver-haired woman in a tweed suit folded an umbrella that she had been holding over a young man. Fabian saw that the young mans head, neck and torso were trapped by tightly fitted aluminum railing and knobs. His face—pale, pure features, oddly serene within that cage—seemed familiar; Fabian recognized him as an American polo player who a few months earlier had broken his neck in a game in the Midwest. At a sound coming over the loudspeakers, the young man twirled a knob at his hip; the contraption rotated him in the direction of a loge in the front row.
There Commodore Ernest Tenet Stanhope, once an eminentpolo player himself and now the family’s ninety-year-old patriarch, had risen to speak into the microphone. Wearing the customary white polo breeches and British helmet, he announced that, as honorary chairman of the tournament named in memory of his late son, Eugene, he had just been informed that his other and only surviving son, Patrick Stanhope, would regrettably not be able to attend; his obligations as president and executive director of Grail Industries, the Stanhope family enterprise and the nation’s largest electronics manufacturer, detained him. He had, however, generously made available the helicopters which would help to dry the field, so as to permit the tournament to take place. A roar went up from the stands, and then the patriarch passed the microphone to Lucretia Stanhope, his daughter-in-law, a stately widow of forty. Serene in her position as chief organizer, she apologized briefly for the delay.
Having taken occasion to remind the spectators that, only two years before her husband, Eugene Stanhope, had been killed tragically in a freak accident while preparing for this very tournament, she paused, then closed by announcing that the Eugene Stanhope Stables, breeders and
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